The darkest figure of European history declared infamously that the mass of a nation’s people fall prey more easily to a great lie than to a small one. The great lie is repeated, and repeated, and repeated – until it becomes engrained in the public consciousness as a self-evident truth.

Cllr Adrian Jones puts the case that Jeremy Corbyn is very much in Labour’s mainstream.

The British Establishment’s survival-instinct is a powerful force. It recognised and well understood the stark reality that its positions of excessive privilege were at greater risk from the re-emergence of “Mainstream” Labour than had been the case for a generation.
Its voices needed no orchestration to chorus its great misrepresentation of Jeremy Corbyn.

Not since the great, reforming, Mainstream, Labour government of Clem Attlee had the UK’s “workers by hand or by brain” chosen a leader so closely meeting their aspirations – and their legitimate needs – as Jeremy Corbyn.

Denigrated as “Extreme” and “Hard Left”, with almost clinical skill by the master-propagandists of an overwhelmingly Tory-biased news media it was only a small step for Corbyn to be perceived by those (some even of our own Party – schooled in a generation of neoliberalism) as “well-meaning, but unelectable”. Some, like Owen Smith, have since declared publicly that they were wrong. In her general election victory speech, following an overwhelming increase in her own electoral support, Angela Eagle paid tribute to Corbyn’s role – and to the relentless work of Party members.

Cllr Chris Jones:” We never doubted that Labour could win with Corbyn as leader. Despite all the propaganda we very nearly did – and we are ready for an election as soon as it comes.

Overcoming the unprecedented propaganda-onslaught, Corbyn emerged as a phenomenally successful leader. Against all the common wisdom, that he was “unelectable”, he emerged to those who had doubted him as startlingly effective. But to those of us who supported Labour during the Mainstream Wilson Governments, and who never doubted (nor, like Corbyn, ever deserted) our Labour Party he was not seen as startlingly, but as predictably, effective.

He is now recognised, justifiably, as one of the most capable, far seeing, and publicly popular figures in Labour history.

At last, when Mrs May went to the polls last month (convinced it seems by her own side’s propaganda) in what she believed was the certainty of a great Tory victory, she had no idea of the collapse of support she faced.

We had every confidence that it would collapse!

All over the UK people were demonstrating today, 23rd January, just as your Labour (and ONLY Labour) Councillors and members were in Liscard shopping Centre.

For months before the general election your three Seacombe Labour Councillors, Chris, Paul and Adrian, were out in Seacombe, and neighbouring wards, knocking doors, and on street stalls along with other Labour activists – old, new, and very welcome returners. We were patiently explaining the Manifesto, and winning over those whose belief in the Establishment’s relentless propaganda-bombardment was already being shaken thin by Corbyn’s excellent performances on television – and by the inability of the Tory-biased media to repulse our message.

Cllr Paul Stuart: “As the campaign went on we were winning people over to Corbyn, on the doorstep, and his television appearances were crucial. At last voters could see through the propaganda.

We were always absolutely confident that when Corbyn could no longer be denied reasonable television and radio-time, minds would be changed. And increasingly they were.
When hundreds of thousands of supporters all over the country knocked doors, posted leaflets exposing the truth, and used social media – the chosen means of information-exchange for a new, young, generation – then the Great Deception, the Establishment’s denigration of Corbyn, would at last be challenged.
What was it that was so utterly convincing about Corbyn that, despite the relentless media and “Establishment” war against him, Labour came so close to winning and the super-confident Tories so close to disaster?

It was simply that he, and the Labour Party he leads, offered a Manifesto representing the interests of the great mass of the people – not the few, the very tiny few, whose interests had for decades taken precedence.

Clem Attlee, the greatest of Labour Prime Ministers, who re-built our country after Hitler’s war would have found nothing in Corbyn’s Manifesto that was not mainstream policy.

The Manifesto was not “Hard Left” – it was not “Extreme”; it could have been presented by Clem Attlee or Harold Wilson. It embraced Labour’s timeless principle that the directly productive, and the socially useful, people in every land must not forever continue to be milked by a minority who have gathered the ownership of wealth-creating property to themselves.

It offered the hope of fairness for all; of controls to prevent merciless property-grabbing of a spiv-economy that condemns millions to poverty. Through the privatisation and concentration of ever more of the country’s existing housing stock into the hands of private landlords, home ownership has become yesterday’s dream for a huge chunk of the present generation. The Manifesto offered the restoration of workplace employment rights, the protection of the NHS and public health care, the restoration of public ownership of key parts of the “commanding heights of the economy”, increased rights for women, the restoration of equal educational opportunities for the young – no longer to be increasingly “rationed” to children whose parents who can afford to subsidise them during university and with their debts afterwards. And it offered greater hope for the old as well as the young.

Another great Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson would have been entirely at ease with Corbyn’s mainstream Labour policies.

In short Labour’s Manifesto offered a future in which working people can produce co-operatively for the good of all. The bland alternative was, and remains, the Hard-right politics of our opponents – whose “ideology” (as they sometimes fancifully describe their crude dogma) regards human labour-power, the ability to work, as merely a commodity like any other to be disposed of by the workers who own it at the best wage-price they can get – and to be bought from them at the lowest market price to which employers can drive it down.

The “austerity” of the Tories and LibDems under Cameron and Clegg, and continued by Mrs May, is essentially a programme of wage depression – and the “Corbyn phenomenon” was the mass popular reaction against it.

From “ConDems” to “ConDUPs” – where next for the “willy-nilly wandering” party?

At the time of penning this note (16/09/17) the badly-leaking Tory Cabinet was widely reported on Sunday morning’s “Marr Show” and the “Andrew Neill” show just after) to be in a condition of chaos with a hopelessly divided, rudderless, party – jilted by their previous LibDem bed-fellows and now cuddling up to the DUP after conceding ££,£££,£££ from their “magic money tree”.

Yesterday, 18th July, the implosion of unity in the Tory Party was front-page revelations across even those newspapers that normally give such slavish support to them – itself an indication of the extent of confusion and internal turmoil in the Tory Party.

Today, 19th July, the media headlines tell us the Tory “rump” is biting its own head – as the main body of the Parliamentary Tory Party calls on Mrs May to sack her own Cabinet members for disloyalty. And this is the shambles of a Party that is running the country!

A new general election is badly needed. Seacombe Ward Labour Party will be ready whenever it comes.

46433″> Birkenhead MP Frank Field says in today’s Echo: “These appalling figures are sadly to be expected when taxpayers’ money is skewed to the richest areas at the expense of the poorest.”[/caption]Here in the UK the difference is even more dramatic. Wirral babies can on average expect to live until they are 66 or 67. But in wealthier areas they can expect to make it well into their 90s. Yet Wirral Tories have parroted the vacuous slogan “We’re all in this together”.

Has anybody heard of a single Wallasey Tory councillor or spokesperson calling on their government to treat the North and North West of England more fairly? Do let us know if you have. Meanwhile with residents in large parts of Wallasey Constituency, and other areas of Wirral, amongst the most economically disadvantaged in Northern Europe today’s “Echo” reports on its front page just how bad it is.

Just over a week ago I posted the report below because I am so consciouse of the effects that the Tories’s approach to the National Health Service could have on the low and middle income people I represent in Egremont, Seacombe, Poulton and Somerville. Things have certainly moved fast in a week – and not very well for the Tories. The newspapers are increasingly open about the damage to its own popularity the Tory-led government is creating for itself.

The Bill seeking to change Labour’s NHS so fundamentally is back in the Lords on 8th Feb. The Government seem to be on the defensive. “Yougov” has just published the results of a new survey on public attitudes to the NHS and its reforms, with a sample size of 1884. Here are some of the highlights:

36% trusted the Coalition to deliver high quality NHS services, but a startling

57% didn’t trust the government “much or at all”.

Could you?

A full breakdown by political party support, gender, age, social group and region is available at:

A higher percentage of the British public opposes the Government’s plans to restructure the NHS than supports them, and faith in the Coalition’s ability to deliver NHS services is sinking. After all didn’t the Tories go into the general election with slogans that they could be ‘trusted’ with the NHS? Who believes that now?

Cllr Chris Jones gives her opinion of the government’s NHS proposals

On 22nd January Chris reported:

Following years of neglect under Tory governments, Labour invested heavily in replacing crumbling buildings and increasing nurse and doctor numbers to rebuild the National Health Service. Most residents of the Wallasey Riverside area, covering from Seacombe to New Brighton, would agree that we are now well served with excellent local medical practices, backed up by top class Wirral hospitals. But we have not yet met anybody on the doorstep who believes what this Tory-led government is now doing to the NHS is acceptable.

Follow the link below to read Angela’s summary in November. The latest developments show her view was spot on.

Labour created the National Health Service during the economic aftermath of Hitler’s war when Britain faced economic re-construction with burdens greater even than the Bankers’ gambling-debt crisis we are all now being forced to pay for. It was created in the face of dogged opposition from the Tories. So what’s changed?

Health is the most important element of every person’s ‘wealth’. Isn’t there something fundamentally unwholesome about the privatisation of health provision into profit inspired businesses?

Last week the pressure on Lansley increased when official health department data revealed that the number of patients not being treated within the 18-week time limit has soared by 43% since the Tory/LibDem coalition took office. Led by the Doctors’ organisation “The British Medical Association” a meeting has been called of all 20 members of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges. Along with the nurses’ and midwives’ unions, these health professionals are calling loudly for the bill to be scrapped.

The meeting comes as one of Downing Street’s advisers on the NHS, Professor Chris Ham, King’s Fund health thinktank chief executive, warns that growing disquiet across the medical establishment “could become an NHS version of the Arab spring”.

Despite the Tories’ attempts to personalise politics, with rather silly jibes at individuals, we believe the people of the UK will no more forgive the collaboration government of LibDems and Tories, for their policies towards the NHS, than they will for their closeness to the bankers who plunged the world into its present economic chaos.

This ‘Health Policy Insight’ article provides excellent information, well worth reading for anyone who believes in the NHS

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